news.slashdot.org Archives - 15 March 2013, Friday

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a story at Forbes about what's said to the first Bitcoin hedge fund ; the article goes into some of the details of how the (literally) valuable data is kept. A selection: "The private key itself is AES-256 encrypted. After exporting Bitcoin pr...

"Bitcoin is gaining popularity among mainstream sites lately and the latest to adopt the digital currency as a medium of donations and payments is the Internet Archive . Ready to accept donation in the form of Bitcoin, the Internet Archive announced that it wants to do so to pay some ...

Some time ago Gregory Maxwell proposed the idea of autonomous programs that maintain their own Bitcoin wallet. He gave the concrete example of StorJ, a program that provides encrypted file hosting capacity a la MEGA. By buying server time from VPS providers and re-selling services, pu...

First time accepted submitter ASDFnz writes "The reward for successfully completing a block (also called mining) is about to halve from 50 bitcoins to 25 . From the article: 'Bitcoin is built so that this reward is halved every 210,000 blocks solved. The idea is as bitcoin grows the t...

"Short on arable land? One solution would be to plan up. Singapore, a small country that imports most of its food, has now begun selling vegetables from its first vertical farm . And even while they're more expensive the vegetables are already selling faster than they can be grown. If...

Um... no, you're wrong. They are insurance. Producers of commodities often can not afford the ups and downs of the market. Specifically farmers. Futures allow them to sell their crop at a set price, and then if the market crashes they are protected... also, if there's a spike in price...

"There is one more way to use your BitCoins rather than buying weed or socks . Recently, a Bitcoin Exchange called ICBIT quietly introduced a futures market , obviously using Bitcoins as its main currency. Gold futures trade roughly at 137 BTC/tr.oz and Sweet Crude Oil at 7.3 BTC/bbl....

it's about time I clear my conscience... The system keeps track of what funding sources you've been "in contact" with, kinda like Bitcoin's idea of "taint" The implementation is quite clever, involving some modular arithmetic and the 24-byte "Transaction Authentication Code" detailed ...

"Despite the many people calling it out as a Ponzi scheme from the beginning, Pirateat40 was able to collect millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from thousands of Bitcoin users. At almost every stage Pirateat40 copied the path of the EVE Online Ponzi scheme except on a much larger s...

New submitter beltsbear writes "Despite the many people calling it out as a Ponzi scheme from the beginning, Pirateat40 was able to collect millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from thousands of Bitcoin users. At almost every stage Pirateat40 copied the path of the EVE Online Ponzi s...

Some very talented folks I once had the pleasure of meeting just went out of business. They had formed Bitcoin Harbor [bitcoinharbor.com], an exchange for buying and selling items strictly in bitcoins. I suspect the undue lack of popularity for bitcoin is to blame, but there has been ...

A worldwide, multi-billion dollar company doesn't want to help promote a new competitor that undercuts their price and their control over the global flow of money? I never saw that one coming! Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhe...

I could answer this one two ways, but I'm going to go with blaming the victim on this one. There have been a rash of thefts surrounding BitCoin wallets in some of the stupidest ways (any number of BitCoin sites, for God knows what reason, have been using MySQL for their backend, and m...

"Every day or so of the last six months, Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin has crawled and scraped Silk Road, the Tor- and Bitcoin-based underground online market for illegal drug sales. Now Christin has released a paper (PDF) on his findings, which show tha...